Social Media and SEO
In this post we are going to look into how exactly social media can affect your SEO. Social media is a fairly new thing that has been continuing to develop over the last decade, but it is something that almost every person uses today. Most people even spend time on it every single day of their life. If something has that big of an impact on society, it must be able to affect your search engine optimization.
The history of SEO and social media has been somewhat rocky. In the early days of social media, it was clear that it was a great tool for SEO. Then, in 2014, Twitter actually blocked Google from being able to use their analytics. Because of this, the importance of SEO and social media dies down quite a bit.
First, let’s look into why social media is important to SEO. Google has started to realize that people love social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and other sites. Because of this, they have been showing up in Google search results more and more. Google actually now considers these sites to be within their top one hundred sites to provide search results from. If Google puts this much weight on results coming from social media sites, it must impact your site’s rankings somehow.
Let’s figure out how this affects your site.
First, SEO is for Google and social media is for interacting with the visitors of your site. Both are important, and both are actually related to each other as well. When you interact with the people from your site on a personal level, you are forming more of a relationship with them. This will make them want to read your information more often, which in turn will make you have more site traffic.
People are more likely to share the things that they love on social media than on other parts of the internet, because this is just how people live and interact in today’s society. Because of this, your followers may share either your social media page or your actual website with the people they love on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. If they do this, you will get new site visitors as well as more traffic from the older ones.
One of the ways that social media can help you the most is through content promotion. You can share any and all of the articles that you want to share with your followers. You do not need to worry about them needing to find your article through Google or SEO in this manner, but the extra traffic you receive of course still benefits your SEO anyway without much effort from you.
Social media also helps your brand awareness. When people are more aware of your company, blog or web page, then more people will visit your site. This again helps your SEO. You can make people more aware of your site through social media because so many people are mindlessly scrolling through there already.
This means that you should give as much importance to your social media posts as you do to your website, because they could be the things that show up in the Google search results first.
Let’s look into some ways that you can use Facebook specifically to bring new visitors and traffic to your actual site.
Facebook has something called a total count. When you share a post, this is the total number of likes, comments, and shares that your post receives. This exact number plays a huge role in where your post shows up in Google search result rankings. If your total number is high, your post has a much better chance at being seen in Google search results than if your total number was low.
Facebook is also a good link building tool. This is because people that you do not know will see the information that you share on your page without you even having to market to them. This may make some of your followers link to your content without you even putting in an effort to build links. This makes Facebook and great and easy tool that you can use to potentially raise your SEO.
Most of the time, Facebook is not a professional environment. Because of this, it is important for you to remember that even though it is just Facebook you still need to keep your content professional. This is important because again, your social media posts can show up in Google results. If an unprofessional post shows up on Google instead of your actual page, your SEO will be significantly lowered from the lack of site visits that you will receive.
Twitter now allows Google to see and use their information
Twitter now allows Google to see and use their information and the information posted to their sites by users again, so it is again a great tool to use for SEO. On Twitter, you need a lot of Twitter followers to show up in Google results. To get a large number of followers, try following a large amount of people. If you follow them, they are pretty likely to at least click on your page to check you out. If they like you and your page, they may even follow you back.
If you put high quality content on Twitter, you can use hashtags to help your intended audience to find your post. Make sure that your quality is good and that the content matches with what the hashtag says, though, so that your posts do not come across as spam. It is also important that on Twitter, you fill out your biography section and that you fill it out in an accurate and exciting way. This will make more people interested in what you have to say because they will be interested in you as well. You should also put a link to your website in your biography section to help the people that like your tweets reach your actual page and give you even more traffic than you already have at the time.
There are other sites that can help your SEO as well. YouTube, for example, is a great one. YouTube is owned by Google, so their results show up high more times than not. Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest can all be good SEO tools to use as well.
Social Media Analytics
Next, let’s look into something called social media analytics. Social media analytics are sites and tools that you can use to tell you how well you are performing on social media. They can tell you how many people are seeing your posts, interacting with it, and how to improve these numbers. They can tell you the best times of day to post to your specific group of followers as well as the posts that they enjoyed the most. This will help you to know your follower base well and understand what they want. You can then consider giving them more of what they want and less of what they do not want. This helps your social media followers to thoroughly enjoy their interactions with you and makes them much more likely to share your page and site with their followers, families, and friends.
Sprout Social is a good social media analytics tool. It can be tried for free for thirty days and then costs 99 dollars every year. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This tool is nice because it allows you to see all of your social media accounts from different platforms all in one place. This can save you a lot of time and effort compared to having a separate analytic tool for every social media site that you have an account with.
Buzzsumo is a good tool to use as well. This tool does not look into your social media accounts. Instead it finds your actual website content on different social media platforms. It then tells you how these articles or this content is doing in different areas of the internet. This can be very helpful if you are looking into an article and not a social media account. Buzzsumo searches Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It also costs 99 dollars for every year that it is used.
Overall, it is easy to see that social media plays a huge role in your SEO and simply how people view and interact with the information that you post online, either on your social media accounts or on your website.
Let’s make a list of the things that you need to remember about social media and SEO:
• Social media post show up in Google results;
• Social media sites increase viewer interactions;
• Social media gains traffic for your actual site;
• Make sure to have accurate and interesting social media biographies;
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest can all affect SEO;
• Social media analytic tools can help you manage your social media accounts and can help maximize the benefits coming from them.
With this information and the tips and tricks that we shared in this post, you have every piece of information that you need in order to make your social media sites optimize your SEO.